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The Screens Have EyesHaving just read Phil Patton's article on the use of video surveillance ("Caught," Wired 3.01, page 124), and being familiar with the controversies surrounding other forms of surveillance (smart ID cards, network keystroke monitors, et cetera), it occurred to me that the impact of context and content monitoring has not been fully explored.

Patton describes an existing security system in which related events trigger increased surveillance (product removal without an activated register).

This appears to be a context-based monitoring system. Other context-based monitoring systems may soon follow. For example, a variety of tax packages allow users to send their returns directly to the IRS - even if the figures on those returns do not match those in the users' Quicken files or bank accounts. Perhaps, in the future, we will be bound by programs that don't allow transmission unless our tax returns match our financial records. Similarly, the software that allows you to write electronic "checks" might someday prevent you from issuing a check beyond your financial means. (Cue Tom Selleck voice-over: "Have you ever gotten a 'No Such Funds' fee charged against your Microsoft Money account? You will.")

Most readers are probably sitting near a machine that can keep track of every key pressed or file stored. Our computers hold a myriad of personal and private files. Currently, there are few concerns, because only humans understand what those files mean. We may be in for a change. The latest advance in word processors is artificial intelligence-style software that corrects typos as they happen. Simply put, the computer keeps track of every key pressed and corrects you when it decides you've made a mistake. This may be the grandfather of the algorithm that someday utters the words:"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't send that videomail. It's simply not true."

The next revolution is upon us. We are poised on the threshold of an era in which the technology that stores and delivers our media may soon be able to understand it as well.

Bruce RosenSan Francisco

Pretty Good Stab at ItI was glad to see Tom Hays's article about PGP in the January Net Surf section (Wired 3.01, page 147), though there were some omissions and some information that was incorrect.

First of all, Hays reversed the keys: the public key is for those who want to send you encoded messages; the private key is used by you to decode them.

As for the omissions, nothing was said about public- versus private-key encryption, which is the heart of the PGP revolution. The entire legal situation surrounding PGP was also not covered. That the author, Phil Zimmermann, is facing prosecution by the US government for publishing PGP is pivotal to the story. So are the related facts: that PGP is regulated by ITAR (International Trade in Arms Regulations) as an export-controlled armament, and that export outside the US and Canada is illegal. In fact, those outside North America should not follow the instructions in the files listed in your article.

Nothing was mentioned about the two different flavors of PGP on the market - the freeware version known now as MIT PGP, available through the Internet and various BBSes, and ViaCrypt's published version that costs around US$100 (depending on which platform you're running).

Finally, to compare PGP and the Clipper chip - to mention them as equivalent technologies, as Hays did - misses the whole point of PGP. PGP is high-level encryption for the masses. Clipper is obsolete technology with a backdoor for Big Brother.

Thanks, David, for the clarification on the public- versus private-key definition - my wording was unclear. As to omissions, they're the pimple on the butt of brevity: the article was a quick how-to primer, not a backgrounder. Finally, I simply did not "compare" PGP and Clipper. - Tom Hays

Sailing in the Wrong DirectionI suppose Tabitha Powledge's claim that everything carried in America's libraries is "tedious, lackluster flapdoodle" ("The Maryland Net: Almost Free, Almost Good" Wired 3.01, page 39) is to be expected of a generation whose crowning intellectual achievement is the tallying of monsters killed in another hourslong MUD game. The article goes on to question government's role in providing Internet resources to the masses, suggesting this is "horning in" on private enterprise's right to make a killing on the Net.

I was unaware private industry had poured billions of stockholder's equity into inventing the Net, thus deserving a return on investment. I seem to remember this, too, was provided by government. The last National Research and Education Network bill exceeded US$1 billion, $350 million to the National Institutes of Health alone, both courtesy of us taxpayers. Given this genesis, the idea of monopolized toll-booth on-ramps to the infobahn ought to be severely scrutinized.

That's why my library is providing free Internet access to every citizen in the county who wants an account. That's a real e-mail account, real Gopher access, and a whole lot of local community and government information. And it's not just for people who have computers and modems, either. It is available at dozens of public terminals located in branch libraries throughout the county. Please show me any private provider who will do that without having a Visa-card reader alongside the machine. A lot of people pay lip service to the information-disenfranchised. We're doing something about it.

Plastic People Are OKThank you for your wonderful story "Triumph of the Plastic People," (Wired 3.01, page 100). I lived in Prague from February '93 until March '94. I was the marketing director for Prognosis for one year, and was acquainted with many of the YAPs you mentioned in the article.

Prague is truly the most magical and wondrous of places, and a day doesn't pass without my mind filling with memories of the Golden City. I think many of the young Americans living in Prague have realized the American Dream in a most unlikely place - where the pen is mightier than the sword.

The Eyes Have ItThanks for putting a Braille "Get Wired!" on the cover of your January issue (Wired 3.01).

The electronic information explosion that Wired covers represents an excellent opportunity for access to information by all, including print-impaired users.

The Internet Engineering Task Force HTML Working Group has added SDA, or "Software Document Access," attributes to HTML 2.0. This souped-up SGML application supports the transformation of valid Hypertext Markup Language to the International Committee for Accessible Document Design's Document Type Definition. ICADD is designed to support Braille, large print, and voice synthesis.

For more info on HTML, ICADD, and Braille, check out http://www.ucla.edu/ICADD/html2icadd-form.html; for info on HTML 2.0, have a look at http://www.hal.com/%7Econnolly/html-spec; and for more on HTML for accessibility, open http://www.gsa.gov/coca/WWWcode.html.

Drop the Middleman, But Keep the LibrarianNicholas Negroponte's column, "Bits and Atoms" (Wired 3.01, page 176), speaks plainly about threats to the media industry from digital technology. This may just be the story of the millenium; literally a demarcation between the 20th and 21st centuries. Others have called this trend "disintermediation."

All intermediaries are at risk in this new, more efficient digital environment. Why? Because they may no longer add sufficient value to command a meaningful percentage of the value chain. When the "enhanced network" can package and distribute media products, even down to a personalized level (pointcasting), we certainly won't need a large corporation to do it.

Michael D. CareyNorfolk, Virginia

While for the most part I could not agree more with Nicholas Negroponte's comments, I must take exception to the subtle portrayal of libraries as an industrial age-based organization that arranges and disseminates information.

Libraries exist not simply to provide books to the masses, but to provide information and access to information that the public could not individually afford. This is where Jefferson's ideals prevail.

I too look forward to a time when all people can become instant publishers. However, with such an environment comes an amazing need for libraries, and more importantly, librarians! There must be some source of indexing, cataloguing, and (to show the little fascist in us all) authority.

Libraries may indeed lose their walls, they may indeed lose their books, but we must never lose the library or the librarian.

Libraries, as places and as buildings, are the product of an industrial age, and, sooner or later, will go away. But librarians will not disappear. They will be the agents that help us do all the things you say. - Nicholas Negroponte

The People Are Powerless (with selectively edited information)I read with interest Evan Schwartz's startlingly uncritical article about the Clinton administration's use of cyberspace ("Power to the People," Wired 2.12, page 88). Immediately after finishing the article, I logged on to America Online and went straight to the White House Forum to download Clinton's 1992 position papers. Sure enough, the file still omits the first 95 pages, and a text search found no reference to a middle-class tax cut or gays in the military. The first time I noticed these omissions, I e-mailed the White House. I was eventually told, via snail mail, that staffers didn't have time to respond to my letter.

Political operatives, whether Democrat or Republican, have no interest in disseminating unfiltered information. I am confident that other documents have been similarly edited or selectively released.

Totally ScaryKudos to the creative geniuses behind "The Wired Scared Shitlist" (Wired 3.01, page 110) and to Wired for once again making me think more than I wanted to - and for scaring the shit out of me! I missed my subway stop twice today because I couldn't get my nose out of the magazine.

Kim MarkworthWashington, DC

I can't figure out which is worse - Times Square being A-bombed, or Bob Dole as president. Any chance of moving the White House to Times Square?

I read "The Wired Scared Shitlist" and was amazed at the amount of work that must have gone into such a tasteless, questionable work. All I can ask is, Are you guys sitting too close to your monitors again?

A Plagiarized RevolutionRégis Debray's "hybridization" (others would say "plagiarization") of viewpoints previously expounded by Foucault, Bateson, and McLuhan should have been allowed to wander in cyberspace rather than being given the legitimacy of print ("Revolution in the Revolution" Wired 3.01, page 116).

Debray's notion of a "mediosphere," for example, has resonance with Bateson's "noosphere," i.e., human intellectual activity impacts the planet earth as do biological spheres. Foucault labored long and hard to describe the transmission of ideas in his text The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault more accurately depicts this transmission as a networked, or hypertextual, event rather than Debray's more mundane reification of "geological strata."

A more trenchant and current discussion of postmodern literary trends can be found in Jay David Bolter's book Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing.

Propagating the Meme MemeIn the January issue, you published a letter from a reader suggesting that Mike Godwin should have credited Richard Dawkins as the creator of the idea of memes ("Memetic Correction," page 28). The notion that he did so is nonsense, though this nonsense seems to be published in every cyberculture magazine on a monthly basis now that memetics is trendy.

Dawkins did indeed coin the term "meme" in his excellent 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. But he certainly did not invent the idea of a meme. A sound argument could be made for giving the credit to Charles Darwin, who implies in several places that he understood how his theory of natural selection could apply outside the biological sphere. Several years before Dawkin's book was published, the evolution of ideas was being openly discussed in biological circles. Jacques Monod's widely read book, Chance & Necessity (1970), for example, contains an entire chapter on the selection of ideas.

I have benefited greatly from reading Dawkins and have nothing but respect for the man, but it seems only fair to give credit where it's due. Unlike religion and politics, in science, the claim to truth is not awarded to whomever comes up with the pithiest new name for an old idea.

The White AlbumWow! Typography has returned. Your January 1995 issue allows the word "typography," defined as the style and appearance of printed matter, to find its way back into magazine publishing.

Someone, somewhere, needed to do it. You did. Lets not make this a test - keep it, it's great.

Hal LewisScranton, Pennsylvania

OK. I must compliment you on your white-on-white January cover - different! I especially like the raised letters. I dig the look. Yet, when I opened the magazine and saw black-and-white throughout the magazine (or metallic, or whatever), I thought I had hyper-travelled backward 10 years! (Remember the days of amber-and-black monitors?)

I want my color! I felt like you swapped my color monitor for a black-and-white - how painful! I live off the intense color and graphics, and felt like a user who didn't receive his fix of ocular heroin!

UndoIn our January installation of the Geek Page ("All Aboard: The rush toward ATM," Wired 3.01, page 56), we stated that the OC-3 standard runs at 155 Mbytes per second. It actually runs at 155 Mbits per second, or 15 times the current ethernet speed of 10 Mbits per second.